and if i just might wake up alone, bring on the night
by starinhercorner
Summary: "The whole planet is different without her, and he will always hear its name in her voice." [Supermartian. Character death.]


He wishes the most recent memory of her wouldn't always be the one that surfaced first when he thought about her, but in essence it's the closest he can get to her now. And that's what he still wishes for, to be as close to her as possible. He can't help that her forehead pressing beads of sweat into his skin and leaving a spot darker than black on his shirt was the last time she physically touched him. He pretends it's not, at night, like this. Just like this. That the sheets gathered a certain way are actually her arms tucked around him, and that the pillows set against his back are actually her head and chest, and that the flat mattress against his temple is actually the pillow that should be under his head, and that all the pieces fit where they always did in the puzzle of falling asleep next to her. That the struggle to stay awake came from not wanting to take his eyes off of her, not from only being able to imagine her this clearly when there was nothing else to see.

* * *

_"Did everyone make it?" she asked, as if she wasn't everyone. Or as if the gashes ripped across her skin by sheer force and her heavy, rattling breath didn't disqualify her from being one of the "unscathed." Nevertheless, he nodded, and upon realizing that her eyes weren't open wide enough for her to see him nod, managed to push out some sort of affirmative grunt. "Yes!" she exhaled through her teeth, sounding relieved until her next intake of air turned to seething, and the furrowing of her brow brought definition to a forehead vein._

_"M'gann, hold on, we'll-" He didn't know what. He didn't know what else to do but stare at her and the blood sticking to the tears in her uniform and in-between his fingers as he tried to keep her head level. Her neck wasn't in any shape to offer its own support, not when clusters of her cells were still trying to push her vertebrae back into the right alignment, not when impact would have cleanly snapped her neck in half if she hadn't shifted enough to counter it._

_"No, it's okay, I'm not what ma-" And her voice went from croaking to choking to coughing at the out-of-place pressure on her throat. She pinned her lips shut and flexed her neck, wincing as she forced the coughing to cease._

_His hand crept towards her face until he fully realized that he couldn't just pull the thing out of her that was making it hard for her to breathe and speak and keep her eyes open. He couldn't seize death, couldn't crush it in his fist and break its hold on her. He always knew that, of course, but it never mattered like this. His hand hovered above her, as if the lightest touch would sap what was left of her strength. And she had so much strength. To direct monumental shock waves and a hurricane of shrapnel all in on itself-he sat in partial disbelief that he could even still be here after the ship's self-destruction. But the state of her in his lap made it real._

* * *

The blanket makes it off of his back in the course of the night and into a clump against his chest, drawn in tight by his 's always a comfort to be able to hold something, even if it makes him feel like a child. He never was one, so it isn't as if he's regressed too far. His head is in the past just enough to attribute her smile to a crease in the bedsheet, and her freckles to the simple pattern speckled across it. Little clusters of little flowers, and he remembers picking some for her in Qurac, not really knowing what compelled him other than the desire to give her something she deserved. He turns from his left side to his right, taking the sheet with him, and ignores the memory that they were poison; focusing only on the light of her face and pretending the light from the window could compare. He rolls into a face-full of pillow and closes his eyes resolutely, letting softness keep him in his head with her, letting a lock of her hair get caught between his lips like it often did when they shared a bed. Which for a time almost long enough to call "years" was almost every night.

* * *

_"Superboy, what's her status? Superboy!" He heard Nightwing's voice coming from behind him, still somewhat distant as they all caught up to him and Gar, and too desperate to give him much chance to answer. Not that he really had an answer to provide, even after the fact, but the silence that ensued once the Team was at his back told him that one wasn't really needed. Even La'gaan had no input, aside from a brief stuttering made up of changing syllables that failed to make it into a word, much less a sentence, and take off after that. Conner had half a mind to drag La'gaan over to her, as if there was something La'gaan could do for her that he couldn't, but letting her go to do so was unthinkable. Only Gar seemed to be able to speak, even though his near-babbling of the word "No" was drowned out at first by the sound of her coughing. Once she quieted herself on that front she opened her mouth wide for an ample gulp of air, and the sound of it being sucked in was too easy to hear, even for him._

_"Gar?" she called out, asking the sky more than anything with her eyes closed too tightly to tell her the direction in which to project. Gar hiccuped, caught up in the momentum of his own sobs even as they stopped, but then slowly picked himself off his bare green knees and stepped closer to her on bare green feet. His fur had vanished along with the rest of his monkey features after the last chunk of rubble his gorilla arms had lifted had exposed her body as part of the wreckage. Her hand that had so far laid limp on Conner's leg began to twitch, her fingers feeling the air for a sign of her little brother's hand, but Gar's lower lip crumpled as he could only stare at it, too scared to touch her. "Gar, are you there?" Her voice was creaking again, and she convulsed slightly in order to keep a cough down._

_"Mm-hmm," Gar sounded out through his nose, nodding like Conner had but with more vigor._

_A smile was suddenly on her face, as if she'd pulled it out of thin air. "Gar, listen to me. You're going to be okay. You're going to be great. You've got such a big family now-" she opened her eyes so she could meet into his, but she couldn't lift her head and her lashes didn't stop fluttering, "-and they'll take care of you. They love you. And I do too. Okay?" She was panting now, but still smiling, and Gar's eyes were filling with a fresh round of tears._

_"Mm-hmm," he said insistently, nodding in a way that shook his whole body. He tilted his chin up and squeezed his hands into fists, trying to portray strength in the face of his big sister who had just saved all their friends. The rise and fall of his chest gave him away, and she chuckled before setting her forehead against Conner's torso and coughing into the space between her and him. Conner panicked internally at the twist of her neck but looking at the back of it, it seemed to have healed, and while his heart skipped a beat it picked its pace back up harder at the chance of her pulling through. He had time for no other reaction, though, because he saw the dark red blood escape from her mouth onto his jeans__._

* * *

There's always a point in the night when he thinks about their breakup. It's an unavoidable part of their-_his_-history, and it marks the start of his nights spent alone, sleeping or otherwise. He tries to keep it brief, tries to ignore the bitterness that sinks to pit of his stomach and makes it curl in on itself with every memory of shouting at her. A pillow tends to travel to the foot of the bed or even the floor as he tosses in place, looking for comfort on his left side and his right side and his back, and ending up on his chest. In a way, he misses the nights he had to make an effort to hear her heartbeat across the hall as he laid in bed, because at least then he could still be rewarded with the sound. Not just the memories of his head against her chest and her chin in his hair and her leg draped over his was still somewhere then. He sets his head down on the back of his hand and stares into his own shadow. So much went wrong. _So_ much went wrong. And he had known it was going wrong, he had clung to that knowledge more fiercely than he had ever clung to her, finally feeling right in himself; but in the end, all he had really done was watch.

It's then that he falls asleep, with the blanket released and wrestled down to the level of his hips, no higher. His fingers on both hands dig into the pillow halfway underneath him, while the fingers on his left hand specifically start to tingle as the weight of his head impedes their circulation. He never cares. He tries to pull himself out of later days into earlier ones, but their-her-last days are anchors, keeping him in the reality that there's no moving forward with her now. Someday soon enough he'll know people who never met her, who'll learn her name but never witness her spirit in action, among neither friend nor enemies. He's just as lonely without her as he is as a rare holder of her memory; and it's memory beyond what can be contained in her grave, where her body is buried in the earth, and her gravestone, into which her Earth name is carved, marking her rightful place there. Here. The whole planet is different without her, and he will always hear its name in her voice. So he falls asleep with the intent, with the hope, to tell her about it.

* * *

_Once it had started, she couldn't help but succumb, no matter how much she was trying to hold it in and hide it for Gar's sake. It didn't work. Gar's eyes went wide as more of her blood strangled itself out of her, hitting the ground and Conner's hand (which he had placed near her mouth in an attempt to help her block it from view) in tiny flecks that seemed to grow as seconds passed. Gar trembled out a sound, his lips stuck on the first letter of her name as he meekly stretched out his hands; and Conner gritted his teeth until Karen stepped from the sidelines to embrace Gar and pull him away. He nodded at her but avoided eye contact, knowing there was a part of him that wanted someone to pull him out of this as well and not wanting to feed it no matter how small it was. He felt something tingle at the back of his thoughts, equally small; and her face had gone still, her brow drawn tightly at its center and held there. Blood was dropping languidly from the corner of her mouth, thickened by the dust and gravel that had accumulated in her lungs. He wanted to shake her, somehow, without knocking her bones out of place—with her body so limp he felt more aware of them than ever—but then the sensation at the back of head spread through the rest of it. It was familiar, but he still flinched, perhaps at just how familiar it was. Her name pulled at the corners of his mouth, but then her voice was already coming into her head, slowly rising in volume__._

_**Conner, can you hear me?**_

_**M'gann, are-**_

_**I'm sorry, I know you said never to—**_

_**No, M'gann, M'gann, please. Please don't—**_

_**I don't think… I can talk anymore. So I have to—**_

_**I get it. It's okay.**_

_**I'm sorry.**_

_He caught a flash of his own face twisting from hurt into anger as furtive strands of her psyche reeled back from his mind. A memory. One of hers, but he remembered it clearly on his own. Thinking about it every time he saw her had kept it fresh, raw, in his mind. He suddenly realized it would be one of the last memories he would have of her. His mind went into stunned silence until her voice scratched at its edges, not strong enough now to break through to it._

_**Conner? **__A tremor passed through her hand, and he felt it spasm against his leg. He picked it up and gave it a light squeeze, and her skin yielded as if it had no will of its own at all, as if he was holding an inanimate object and not the hand of the person he…_

_He didn't let go. __**Y-yeah, I'm still here—**_

_**Can you forgive me?**_

_**Y**__**—**__He shook his head at the very thought of feeling any other way, and at the temptation to only tell her want she'd want to hear now. He was fairly sure they were the same answer anyway. __**Yeah, I c—course. Of course. **_

_He felt her smile in his thoughts as opposed to seeing it, her face still held firmly in concentration. __**Thank you.**_

_A voice came from behind him that he couldn't place a name to at this moment, sounding concerned, and he realized what they—she—looked like then, speaking only through the psychic link. She looked like she was already gone. And he knew she wasn't, but suddenly even the tiniest pause in her thoughts was a potential end._

_**M'gann?**_

_**I'm here.**_

_**Stay here.**_

_**I don't think I can.**_

_**You can. I mean it.**_

…_**Thank you.**_

_**Quit thanking me! You're the one who just… just…**_

_**Did I do the right thing this time? Be honest.**_

_**What are you—yeah. You did. You saved us.**_

_**Really?**_

_**Yeah.**_

_**I'm… so glad I could. **__Her face was starting to relax, and he watched a tear bead at the corner of her eye and slip down the side of her face, disappearing in the roots of her hair.__** Oops.**_

_He didn't mistake her tears for sweat, but when something crawled down the side of his own face, followed by more of its kind, he couldn't accept that he was crying. Not when she was still here and she could sense his disappointment, because really, he wasn't disappointed. At least not with her. Definitely not with her. He honestly was… proud of her. He was so proud of her. And that was what she had to know, not that he would miss her like his lungs miss air whenever he holds his breath underwater. Not that he already felt like drowning. _

_**Conner, I… **__Her voice was fading out, and more of his mind was becoming solely his, the borders of her consciousness receding back down into her. He hadn't felt panic in her until now, but there were all the words she still wanted to say swelling at the back of her head, and she couldn't concentrate enough to direct them._

_**I got you**__, he assured, rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand even though he wasn't sure she could still feel it._

_Her head slipped a little against his chest, tugging at his shirt as she pressed her head as firmly against him as she could with the strength she had left. __**I think I'm…**_

_**I got you, **__he repeated, and sent her a smile in the place of smiling in front of her open eyes, since he knew they were never going to open again. He couldn't help but worry that he was imagining her presence in his head at this point with how quiet her breathing had become. But he couldn't, wouldn't let it be true that she slipped away from him unnoticed. __**And, M'gann?**_

_**Conner? **__She called out, anxiety pulsing under some layer of her psyche in the place of an increased heart rate and managing to overtake his in pace. He could feel himself being reached for, even though he was already holding onto her as securely as he could. __**I can barely… Can you… I'm so sorry… Are you still mad at… I'm so sor…**__ More tears fled from her closed eyes. He didn't want to let go of her hand, so he pressed the side of her face against him with the strength that she'd failed to muster before, in the aftermath of devoting it all to the greater good, and let his shirt soak up what fell from her left eye._

_**No. **__**Stop thinking that. **__**I'm not mad**__**.**__ He gathered up the strength he needed to make her hear his voice when she was barely still in range, and barely a fixed presence in his mind to direct it towards. But he kept his tone calm, soft, in case it was all she could hear. __**Really. **__**Not at all. You're… you're my hero.**_

* * *

Sleeping next to a psychic with an overactive imagination for so long has given him a good grip on lucid dreaming. He can almost forget the fingers tangled up in his are just an accumulation of so many memories, sewn together by his subconscious mind with invisible threads. Her hair is sometimes short, sometimes long, and when he tells her again about the name he suggested be carved into her grave marker, Megan Morse ducks her head and blushes for a moment before M'gann M'orzz thanks him. He never has to explain his reasons for doing so, and she never asks if he forgives her, not anymore. He tells her about the conversation he and Kaldur had when everything was said and done, that Kaldur placed a hand on his shoulder and swore to him that he never blamed her for a second. And she buries her face in that same shoulder and latches her fingers into his shirt sleeve, holding herself there for seconds that can't be measured in a dream before restating what her smile already conveys: that she's so happy. He tells her how Gar is doing in his coursework, and how badly Gar's latest attempt at impressing a girl backfired, and how much Ma and Pa Kent love their honorary… he's never sure how to classify it; and she laughs until she's nearly fallen into his lap. He even tells her about the friendship he and La'gaan have managed to strike up in the past few months, but he doesn't linger on it for fear that this specter of her will think her departure was a benefit to either of them on that front.

One thing she always asks is how Earth handled the invasion after she left (the word "death" in all its variations and tenses never surfaces here, because she's alive here, if only here), and he's always happy to tell her the truth. He tells her they won. He's always sure to tell her that if not for her, Earth would have lost one of its last lines of defense; and that he understands her motives more now than he did back then, he understands wanting to harness your power to its full extent to defend what you want to defend. He doesn't tell her it's because he never felt more powerless than when he watched her do the very thing from the back of the Bio-Ship, as he clung to the frame of its opening. As his muscles ached to leap into the ocean and swim to her, to somehow make it to where she hung in the sky and carry her away from the blast, to somehow finally fly. She doesn't need hear that. She rests her head on his chest and he can hold her as tightly as his arms can grip without breaking her, because nothing can ever break her again. She's always quietest just before he wakes up, as if she or his subconscious or even the piece of her that will always remain in his subconscious knows he does need _some_ rest of his own.

He can't promise her or himself (he knows in a way that there's no real difference) that he'll see her again the next night, but when he does see her again, he'll tell her everything again. He'll recite the same stories and add new ones if he has them, and she'll laugh and smile the same way she has every time. It will be a moment he can always return to, and he knows how rare a thing that is, so even though he can't change anything by going back, he'll never tire of it.

He always leaves one thing for last, when there's sunlight knocking on his eyelids and he starts feeling the air in the room on the skin of his back again, in the place of his shirt. She's like the blanket now, all of her collected in his arms; and he presses his forehead into hers, feeling her imaginary breath on his face. Before he wakes up, he tells her he loves her.

He'll go to sleep the next night hoping for a chance to tell her again.


End file.
